Letters from the Dead

19th-century image (Cape Fear Museum Collection)

Since I've been home from Georgia, I've been trying to keep my Civil War mojo going, and while I haven't read as much as I'd like (does anyone ever?), I have carved out some time to do primary research. It's a great way for me to keep feeling connected to the past.

For the last month of so, I've been avoiding the Museum on Mondays, spending my days at UNCW's special collections, looking at their Civil War materials.

I've been reading Civil War soldiers' letters home. And I've found them to be a startlingly moving combination of mundane and just plain weird. I wasn't really expecting that I would find them so touching.

As a historian, I spend a lot of time buried in the past, thinking about long-dead people.

Unknown woman (Cape Fear Museum Collection)

It's a part of being in the profession.

Still, sometimes the dead speak to you more directly. It was more than 10 years ago now, yet I can almost taste the memory of sitting in the National Archives building in downtown Washington DC, sniffling as I read about a woman who died one December 2nd during World War I.

National Archives Image

The woman, who was a widow with children, was killed by a train as she walked along its tracks. I remember feeling sorry for the locomotive engineer who was just doing his job, and accidentally ended someone's life. Surely he must have felt awful. I remember the brittle, crisp paper of the official typed report. It seemed so detached from death; so bureaucratic. I wondered how the woman's children felt. I wondered when the ripples of this woman's death might calm. I wondered who else missed her, and if anyone loved her.

You might be wondering why I remember all this about this random document. And the answer is deceptively simple. She shares a death day with my own mother.

My mother Anne, 1959

Even at the time I knew I was embarrassing myself in a room full of dusty documents and strangers, crying over a long-dead woman who I'd never met, in the National Archives' fanciest reading room, because her death tangentially touched the fabric of my own life.

My then-intact family, 1970s

I am a big softy. So I really shouldn't be that surprised that these documents move me.

Richard Martin Van Buren Reaves, about 1861 (Cape Fear Museum collection)

And yet I find that I am surprised.

As I've started thinking more about the Civil War, it's really hitting home that, even though I deal in the lives of the dead on a daily basis, my regular brand of history doesn't usually deal so directly in death.

Typically, I haven't spent time reading letters from people who are worried they might die. It leaves an oddly tangible pall over the experience.

There's a melancholy patina that spreads over everything when you start thinking about these often-sad, often-lonely young men who gave their lives to support a side in the nation's bloodiest conflict.

And there are just so many dead to think about. It's unfathomable in some ways. It's no wonder we're drawn to the individual letters and stories -- they give you details to hold onto, in a way that statistics cannot.

The first set of letters I read were written by a man, a boy really, who died before he was 20.

Confederate soldier John J. Wilson (1844-1863) made me laugh. Almost every time he wrote to his family, he started his letter with some version of "I write you a few lines informing you that I am well and present and hope this will [find] you enjoying good health. I have nothing interesting to write at present...." (October 13, 1862).

Perhaps it's just me, but it seemed as though Wilson was apologizing for putting pen to paper, as if even writing home might be seen as to self-aggrandizing. I thought it was pretty funny. Why bother to write if you're going to apologize for doing it?

At the same time, after his protestations that he had nothing to say were out of the way, I felt there was often a lot of interest in his letters. He wrote home about deserters, about being "very soar [sore] from marching" about building entrenchments around Wilmington.

And then, as time went by, he turned maudlin, and started expressing his loneliness: "I should like to see you very much mother." (April 15, 1863).

And then young John died, even as the war and its needs continued on around him.

Dead confederate, April 1865 (New York Public Library Collection)

There's something heartbreaking to read the letter where a Mr. W.R. Bell is balancing needing to get "Johnny Wilson's" gun back, and at the same time expressing sympathy to the family. Bell wrote to a third party on August 6, 1863, "I was very sorry to hear of John's death he was a good boy and made a splendid soldier but it was the will of god and must be so."

And here's where life and history feel like they are tangentially crossing again. As a mother of one small son who could conceivably be conscripted into a war one day, I can't stop thinking about how awful all the death must have been for those left to deal with it, and how difficult it must have been to know what to do and what to say in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

And so, although I don't normally cry in the archives, I feel sure there will be a lot more crying over long-dead men, women, and children before this project is through.

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